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Its not every day that I get contacted by people regarding polyphasic ultrashort sleep, or Uberman sleep, as its called in all boasting seriousness, or perhaps irony, I haven’t quite figured out yet. So the fact that I received three such contacts this week led me to this blog entry regarding the topic. For people who are not familiar with this practice, we discuss its merits and short falls in the Extreme Napping chapter of Take a Nap! Basically, a person engaging in this lifestyle shortens her sleep/wake cycle dramatically so that eight hours of sleep and 16 hours of wake are condensed to 20-30 minutes of sleep and four hours of wake. So following the clock, your life would look something like this: midnight to 4am awake: 4-4:30 nap; 4:30-8:30 awake: 8:30-9am nap; 9-1pm awake: 1-1:30pm nap; 1:30-5:30pm awake: 5:30-6pm nap; 6-10pm awake; 10-10:30 nap. Across a 24-hr cycle, she will be sleeping only 2.5 hours and be awake for the rest.
This practice rests upon one important hypothesis that our biological rhythms are adaptable. This means that we can train our internal mechanisms not only when to sleep and wake, but also when to get hungry, have energy for exercise, perform mental activities. Inferred in this hypothesis is that we have the power to regulate our mood, metabolism, core body temperature, endocrine and stress response, basically everything inside this container of flesh we call home. Truly an Uberman feat!
There is evidence in favor of this hypothesis from studies of humans and other animals. During the summer season in the northern latitudes, millions of people every year acclimate to long lit days without any sign of deterioration to the aforementioned internal mechanisms. During periods of migration, birds will travel for days apparently without the need for sleep. Our 24/7 culture has hospital staff, plant workers, and drivers of goods toiling into the wee hours. These members of society are in fact not living as long, more often infirm, and getting into more accidents than their 9-to-5 working counterparts. But the fact is that they ARE doing it.
Shift-work studies show that the trouble isn’t actually the odd hours, it’s the irregularity of them. If people stick with one specific sleep/wake schedule that has them work all night and sleep all day or nap frequently and only have a few hours of core sleep, they do surprisingly well. A sign of adaptation? Perhaps. So why is there such a self-reported low success rate for Uberman attempts? Many online quorums are started up but soon wane from low membership. What causes the fall-out? Lack of motivation, social pressures that enforce more “normal” behaviors, biological drive? Perhaps listening to the words of the Ubermen themselves will teach us something we don’t know. For more information on this topic check out the Google group
http://groups.google.com/group/Polyphasic?hlen
or
http://www.transcendentalbloviation.blogspot.com
Agree? Disagree? Know something I don’t? I would like to hear from you on the topic of Uberman sleep schedules.
Source: Take A Nap blog |
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